Forgotten Voices

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘So, how’s Miriam?’ Mason, the pathologist, glanced up from his work as his assistant prepared organs for weighing and measuring.

  ‘She’s well, thanks. Sends her regards and says we must get together for a meal or a barbecue or something. Apparently your chilli dip is legendary?’

  Mason laughed. ‘Miriam was always telling me it was a bio hazard … It would be good to get together over something other than a dead body, though.’

  Mac wasn’t sure a barbecue qualified if you wanted an absence of dead things, but he nodded. ‘She’s getting over it,’ he said, knowing that was what Mason really wanted to ask. ‘She still gets bad dreams and flashbacks, but going back to academia seems to have settled her down.’

  Mason nodded. ‘It’ll take time. Thinking you are going to die focuses the mind somewhat abruptly.’

  Mac looked expectantly at the man, wondering at the comment, but Mason did not elaborate.

  ‘She’s still serious about the doctorate?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely. It’s going to cost a bloody fortune, but I think she should do it. And there’s a possibility of part funding she’s looking into.’

  ‘Well, if she needs any references, you know I’m available. So, back to our man here. Not a lot to tell you that you couldn’t already figure out for yourself. He was healthy enough for a man of his age. A little overweight, but generally fit and he met his demise courtesy of a single stab wound.’

  ‘Did the killer get lucky or did he know what he was doing?’

  ‘He … or she … seems to have had a fair idea. Your man must have turned his back and the knife went in from between the last two ribs.’ He broke off. ‘Tom, help me lift him will you.’

  The assistant came over to the bench and between them they lifted the body for Mac’s perusal.

  ‘Here, see? Then at an upward angle and into the heart. Your man would have been dead before he hit the floor. Efficient, eh?’

  Mac nodded and Mason lowered the body back on to the table.

  ‘Any great strength required?’

  Mason considered. ‘That depends. If the killer had hit the rib on the way in, then it would have taken some strength and presence of mind to shift the blade, or push through against the rib. If they’d got the position right from the outset, then no, just about anyone with enough resolve could have done it.’

  ‘And the weapon left in the wound?’

  ‘No reason to suppose that’s not the murder weapon, no. Whoever killed your man, here had a certain … well I hesitate to say style, but their weapon of choice certainly does. And had it been me, I’d have not wanted to leave it behind.’

  ‘It’s a Fairbairn Sykes, isn’t it?’ Mac said.

  ‘Oh, well give that man a biscuit. But what you probably didn’t know is that it’s a period piece, not a later reproduction or even a later authentic model. This is the real deal as they say. I’d have not wanted to cast that aside.’

  ‘Any evidence they tried to remove it?’

  ‘None that I can see. I’ll be checking out the wound again, but I’d have expected to see marks on the ribs or sawing at the edges of the wound and I’ve seen nothing of that so far.’

  Mac nodded. ‘What would a weapon like that be worth?’

  ‘In monetary value? I don’t know. You’d have to ask our friend the Internet. But as a sentimental piece, I’d say it would be priceless to someone.’

  ‘It was developed for the first commando units wasn’t it?’ Mac asked.

  ‘It certainly was. You know I don’t like to speculate, but you do wonder if someone was somehow making a point, don’t you?’

  Mac smiled at him. ‘I wouldn’t like to speculate,’ he said.

  But given what the man was researching, Mac thought, you did have to wonder if the choice of weapon used to kill William Trent might have relevance to the murderer.

  Miriam was home when Mac called her as he drove back towards the airfield. ‘What time will you be home? I thought we might have a meal at the marina tonight.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ Mac told her. ‘I should be back for six. Mason sent his love and threatened you with chilli dip.’

  She laughed. ‘See you later, then. Take care.’

  It was, Mac thought, good to hear her sounding so positive. He tried not to think back to events more than a year before when she had almost been taken from him.

  He turned through the airfield gates, pausing to check in with the officer on guard and exchange a few words with the security guard the de Freitases had left in the booth by the gate. Then he drove his car across to where the body of William Trent had been found.

  It wasn’t the first time that an incident room had been set up on the airfield. The discovery of bones in the excavation for a new entrance gate had brought Mac and his colleagues to this place before. But that had been a sad little death for which the arrest of the killer had brought no one satisfaction. This was something different and, given the circumstances, seemed almost staged, almost overdramatized.

  He found PC Andy Nevins in a tent itemizing the contents of evidence bags before stacking them into cardboard file boxes.

  ‘That looks fun.’ Mac smiled at the younger man.

  ‘God, you wouldn’t believe the amount of rubbish. I doubt any of it’s relevant.’ He indicated the stack of crisp packets and coke cans and unidentified wrappers he was working his way through. Mac glanced at his watch. He had a meeting with Edward de Freitas scheduled, but that wasn’t for another hour.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks. There’s flasks of tea and coffee and sandwiches if you’re hungry.’

  ‘The airfield staff are looking after you then.’

  Andy nodded. ‘Apart from the fact they keep finding more rubbish for me to work through.’

  Mac glanced over to where three desultory individuals paced along the bank at the perimeter of the airfield. Along the top of the bank ran a section of the coastal path and a half-dozen onlookers watched curiously. The body had been found by a member of the clean-up crew litter picking early on the Monday morning after the re-enactment weekend. The CSIs and police officers had collected everything close to the murder scene, and for half a day the place crawled with white-clad CSI and blue-clad officers practically falling over one another. Mac and his colleagues from Exeter had agreed that a wider sweep would be a good idea for the sake of thoroughness. Edward had volunteered some of his staff for the job, the steep bank beside which the body had been found making it logistically difficult, as they had discovered earlier, to organize a larger search team and Andy got stuck with the initial collation.

  Thousands of people had attended the celebration weekend, Mac thought, and they all seemed to have dropped at least one piece of litter.

  ‘So, how are you tackling this?’ he said.

  ‘Well, the random rubbish, crisp packets and the like, I’m consigning to a single box. If there’s anything useful among that lot, well …’

  Mac nodded.

  ‘Chewing gum and cigarette butts are all in there.’

  ‘Chewing gum?’ Mac pulled a face.

  ‘Oh, I have a glamorous life.’

  ‘Anything that might be more interesting, tickets, scraps of paper with writing on … that’s over there. The smallest stack.’

  ‘Good,’ Mac approved. ‘I’ve got a meeting with Edward in an hour. I’d like you to come along to that and then we’ll go and see what Kendall and his colleagues have turned up. Your local knowledge could prove really useful.’

  Andy grinned. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’m bored out of my skull here. How did the PM go?’

  ‘Nothing we didn’t know before. Single stab wound – and you were right about the knife. Have you followed up on local collectors?’

  ‘Um, yes. Three that knew William Trent, all of whom were here at some point over the weekend. They’ve given names of other enthusiasts who might be able to tell us more. William Trent interviewed a whole load of people
for his book and I’ve yet to meet one that actually liked the man. No one in the re-enactment community has reported a Fairbairn Sykes knife missing and Sergeant Baker and me, we double-checked with all the stallholders this weekend. None of them have reported anything like that stolen. There were a couple had thefts, and one of those was an SS dagger, apparently.’

  ‘Which wasn’t what killed William Trent. So as long as we don’t end up with another body, we can safely hand that complaint off to uniform.’

  He glanced once more at the three searchers. They had all settled down in the long grass, sharing a bottle of something Mac hoped was not alcoholic. Now the main body of searchers had gone it all looked terribly leisurely, considering they were involved in a murder enquiry. In truth, Mac’s colleague, DI Kendall and his team were doing the heavy lifting on this one, carrying out the background checks and the interviews. Frantham’s little outpost again found themselves peripheral to the main action.

  ‘Has Rina been over?’ Mac asked.

  ‘Brought cake for elevenses.’

  Mac shook his head indulgently. ‘And a list of questions?’

  ‘No, actually. Just cake. I thought she was supposed to be off filming that TV series of hers.’

  ‘One series is finished, I believe. Lydia Marchant Investigates is scheduled for the spring season. Rina told me the pre-sell has been so good that a second is already commissioned. She’s off again in March, I think.’

  ‘Good for her. My mum and nan are really looking forward to it. They were fans the first time round. My nan just hopes they haven’t spoiled it by going all fancy.’

  Mac guessed those were Andy’s nan’s words and that Andy probably didn’t know what she meant either.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  When Mac and Andy joined Edward de Freitas in the airfield’s newly restored control tower they found him poring over a selection of old maps and, Mac noticed, a number of tracings and overlays that looked more recent.

  ‘William left these with one of the artists,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d better bring them across. I think you’ve got the bits and pieces he left in his locker and his desk?’

  Mac nodded. ‘There wasn’t much. I’m off over to the cottage later. CSI finished up there about an hour ago.’

  ‘CSI, at the cottage? Did something happen there?’

  ‘No, just routine.’ Mac told him. ‘Trent’s home and car and desk, they’re all regarded as potential secondary scenes.’

  Edward still looked puzzled. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see. Anything turn up in the search of the airfield?’

  ‘A lot of rubbish,’ Andy said with feeling. ‘Nothing that looks useful, yet. What are these maps, then? That looks like the tin huts.’

  Edward tapped one of the maps. ‘It is,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure where William found these, but they seem to be plans of the POW camp from about 1942, about six months after it was set up. And this,’ he produced one of the overlays, ‘is what remains now. As you can see, many of the units still in use are there on the plan. A few have been rebuilt but the basic footprint is the same.’

  ‘That’s the car repair place,’ Andy said. ‘And the kitchen fitters and the MOT test centre.’

  Mac nodded. ‘And this?’ He pointed to a group of buildings on the original plan, set just behind the twin lines of huts. ‘Isn’t that where your place is now?’

  Edward nodded. ‘Look, William did an overlay of that too from the plans our architect drew up. Iconograph made use of the original buildings so far as we could and we kept to the footprint of these original buildings, infilling the space between. When we first started to look into the project we were advised that it would simplify the planning application and the whole process if we were seen to be integrating what was already there. Expanding between the existing structures more than doubled our potential ground plan, but we kept within the original bounds. None of the outer walls extend beyond what was already present.’

  ‘And that worked? With the application process, I mean?’ Andy was curious.

  ‘I think there were two modifications. It took, in all, just over a year to get the approval. Not bad compared to some of the projects I know of. It actually took longer to get approval for the work we wanted to do on the airfield. The tower has listed status and there were all sorts of hoops to jump through getting the restoration done. I’m sure there are some people who would rather a place fell apart than let the horrors of commercial enterprise get a look in. But anyway—’

  Mac was leafing through the maps and noticed something about the buildings behind the POW camp. ‘Trent lists this as an admin building for the camp and this as a guard house. What’s this section here? It looks as though it goes down another level?’

  ‘It actually went down two,’ Edward told him. ‘That’s now our R&D department. It was, if you remember, my brother’s side of the business.’

  Mac nodded. Edward’s brother had been involved in a lot of government work. Iconograph, the public face, had provided an ideal screen for other projects. Mac wondered if it still did but knew he wouldn’t get a straight answer anyway.

  ‘William was convinced there had been some kind of bunker down there. That it had been designed perhaps as some kind of monitoring post or something. To be honest, I’d stopped listening to him by them. I wish that wasn’t true, but it is, so—’ he gathered the maps and plans together and handed them over to Mac – ‘no room in life for regrets is there? But that doesn’t stop us having them.’

  Thursday was a regular day for Rina to do a bit of extra shopping at the general store along the promenade. She wasn’t much of a one for supermarkets and one of the reasons she had chosen Frantham as her home was the abundance of small shops and independent retailers. The Grant Emporium was the closest thing Frantham had to a mini supermarket and it did a good trade in the summer from the visitors and the rest of the year ticked over keeping the local community supplied with everything from woolly hats to loaves of bread and household candles.

  Thursday afternoon, just before closing, was a regular date for Rina when she was at home. Her journalist friend Andrew Barnes and his brother came on their weekly shop and Rina made a point of trying to be there.

  Simeon, Andrew’s brother, didn’t cope with crowds. A childhood accident had left him brain damaged and, in the eyes of most people, severely disabled. Andrew and his brother still lived in the old family home high up on the cliffs. Simeon loved to watch the sea and the ships and the night sky. He kept detailed records of everything he saw and once a week, when he came to Frantham with his brother, he showed them to Rina. While she had been away, Andrew had been responsible for posting these observations to her and Rina had made a point of posting her usual responses and comments back the following day, no matter how tired or busy she had been.

  ‘Hello, Rina,’ Grant, the shop owner greeted her with a smile. ‘The boys are down that aisle over there.’

  Rina thanked him. She collected a wire basket from beside the till and went off to find them. Simeon was holding two packets in his hands, trying to decide which he wanted. They contained gas lighters, Rina noted, the sort used to light a stove or a fire. One contained a red and black pair and the second black and blue. For Simeon, such a choice was a difficult one. Andrew waited patiently beside him and it was clear that they had been working on the conundrum for quite some time.

  ‘Blue and red,’ Simeon said as Rina appeared. ‘I want the blue and red.’

  ‘You don’t like the black ones?’

  ‘I like the blue and red, but they don’t do the packets of blue and red.’

  ‘We could buy both,’ Andrew said gently. ‘Then you could have both.’

  Simeon shook his head urgently. ‘No. Then there’d be two black ones that wouldn’t get used. That would be wrong. It would be sad. Things have a purpose. If they don’t get used it would be …’

  Rina exchanged an anxious look with Andrew. Simeon could get terribly upset about what others saw as irrelevant thi
ngs. For Simeon, there was little difference between hurting the feelings of a person and those of an inanimate object. For him, they all had the right to be cared for. When Simeon’s anxiety levels rose, he had been known to lash out and it would not have been the first time that Andrew had to pay for damage done to Grant’s store.

  ‘Could I share them with you?’ Rina asked.

  ‘Share them?’

  ‘I could have the black ones and then you could have the red and the blue. We use those lighters for our fire at home. That way, they’d all get to do what they were made for.’

  Simeon’s expression of anxiety faded and Rina saw Andrew’s relief.

  ‘Yes,’ Simeon said. ‘That would be a good plan. Now I need lunches.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Andrew breathed as Simeon, on familiar ground now, chose five cans of soup and two of spaghetti as he always did and two loaves of bread. One white and one wholemeal. Then his chocolate and his biscuits. ‘Do you have enough coffee?’ he asked his brother.

  ‘I think I could do with some. And I’d like some of that tea you chose for me last time.’

  Simeon nodded and added the tea and coffee to the basket. Rina, adding the few things she needed to her own basket, didn’t attempt to speak to Andrew until they’d reached the checkout and Simeon had explained that he and Rina were sharing the packs of lighters. Simeon needed full concentration for the shopping, and conversation, even not directly with him, was just an upsetting distraction until after he had paid.

  ‘We can go for coffee now,’ he said and the smile lit his eyes. ‘I have my writing to show you, Rina. I saw three new ships this week and five new birds on the bird table and the squirrels are back in the garden because the weather is getting colder.’

  They sat beside the window in Tonino’s and Andrew fetched the coffee while Simeon talked Rina through his discoveries. Simeon’s handwriting was careful and neat and his observations precise. Andrew sipped his coffee as his brother and their friend talked their way through the extensive list and it was only when Simeon, satisfied and now tired by the talk, put his list away that Andrew made any comment. Simeon stared out of the window, watching the sea and Rina knew from experience that he was unlikely to want to speak again until they all said goodbye.